Web Hacking. Data Science. Occasional Soldering.

Java Games: Kickabout League

13 February 2011

For the sake of posterity, and for completeness, I am including links to software I wrote in my first job. I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007 and was hired to write Java browser games to complement Runescape.

Kickabout was a highly ambitious multiplayer football game which I designed and wrote for FunOrb.com. It had over half a million players at its peak during the 2010 World Cup.

The goal was to test realtime multiplayer mechanics over TCP - which turns out to be a very tough problem.

Fortunately, a year after launch, the IETF standardised WebSockets, which provides a much more elegant solution.

Sadly, it means the game quickly became obsolete!

I led a team of four people to develop the game over eighteen months. Kickabout featured an auction house, player customisation, and 4v4 in-browser multiplayer. The game is based on the simplified soccer games I used to enjoy on the NES when I was young.

The game is still available online [as of 2016] but it’s tied to a backend infrastructure which is unlikely to remain online while Jagex winds down their commercial service.